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It took a native of Cape Cod to see Racine’s potential. Gilbert Knapp, a sea captains’ son from Chatham, Massachusetts, first visited the area in the 1820’s, when its only residents were Indians and occasional fur trader. Knapp was the skipper of his own ship at the time, a government revenue cutter that monitored the fur trade on the Great Lakes. He also had a businessman’s eye. During a cruise down the western shore of Lake Michigan, Knapp found himself drawn to the mouth of the Root River. Here, he reasoned, was a potential harbor site that could support a large town – when the time was right.
The time was not right until the next decade. Knapp left the lakes in 1829 to establish a shipping business in New York State, but he remained alert to developments in the West. When he learned that Indian tribes had ceded the Root River region, he sold his New York holdings and returned to Wisconsin. In 1834, a year after the treaty was signed, Knapp claimed 141 acres at the mouth of the Root, 67 acres on the south bank and 74 on the north. To secure his claim, Knapp built a small log cabin, 14 feet square, near what is now the corner of Second and Lake. It was the first non-Indian dwelling within the present city limits of Racine. The cabin stood close to the entrance of what will be the main concourse of Gaslight Pointe, making Knapp, in a sense, Gaslight Pointe’s first resident.
Two investors, one from Chicago and another from Buffalo, joined forces with Knapp. The Buffalo resident paid $1200 for his one-third share. The entire claim, covering most of Racine’s present downtown and a large tract on the north side, was valued at a grand total of $3600.
Settlers trickled into the frontier outpost after 1834. The early arrivals called it “Port Gilbert,” in honor of Captain Knapp, but it was soon renamed for the river. Local Indians had called the place “Chippecotton,” or “Root,” because the stream exposed hundreds of tree roots as it cut through the heavily wooded uplands. French-Canadian fur traders translated the Indian word into their own language, calling the site “Racine.” Nearby settlements like Chicago and Milwaukee adopted Indian names, but Gilbert Knapp’s associates apparently felt that “chippecotton” was too long. “Root River,” on the other hand, was too homespun. They settled on “Racine.”
Whatever the pioneers called it, the river was the reason for Racine’s existence. At a time when railroads were years away and the best highway was barely a trail, the Great Lakes were Racine’s link to the outside world, and the river mouth was literally the community’s front door. Most Wisconsin-bound settlers took the Erie Canal to Buffalo, where they boarded schooners or steamboats for the long voyage to Lake Michigan. Wherever a river entered the lake, like the Root River at Racine, visitors found a settlement that hope to become a metropolis.
The first requirement was an adequate harbor. Racine had a definite potential as a port city, but also faced some natural obstacles. The Root River entered the lake near today’s Gaslight Pointe Marina, breaching a sandbar built up by lake currents. The channel inside the sandbar was fifteen feet deep in places, but the entrances itself was only two feet deep. Most ships anchored well offshore and sent passengers and goods to the beach in small lighters. A few brave captains attempted to “jump the bar,” spreading all sails and trusting the wind and waves to carry them in the deep water beyond the sandbar. (How they left Racine is unrecorded.) One local businessman used an ox-drawn scraper to keep a channel open for his lighter service, but waves invariably closed the gap in a day or two.
Something clearly had to be done, and Racinites turned to the federal government for help with their harbor. In 1841 petition to Congress, community leaders described “the singularly perplexing” state of business in Racine. “Whenever a steamboat approaches,” they wrote, “the alarm is given through the village, and every man must leave his employment to assist in taking a boat with its load, from the river over the sand bar into the lake.” The petitioners warned that failure to act would have dire consequences:
The harbor is to this section of country all in all – without it, it will be deprived of many of the benefits of civilization and education. If its intercourse with the rest of the world is so obstructed that business cannot be carried on here profitably, all motive for exertion will be taken away, and its citizens will inevitably become and unenlightened and degraded people.”
Congress, in its wisdom, ignored the warning. Rather than become “unenlightened and degraded,” citizens took matters into their own hands. In 1843 they resolved to tax themselves, borrow money, and solicit donations to open a channel through the sandbar. The present river outlet was dredged, and two long wooden piers were erected to keep it open. One problem remained. The engineer in charge had placed the channel – “by book learning,” groused one observer – directly above a huge rock outcrop that lay only three feet below the water’s surface. A Milwaukee contractor built a coffer dam around the rock and chipped and blasted until it disappeared.
In 1844, while work on the rock was still under way, the steamer Chesapeake, fifteen days from Buffalo, entered the channel and docked at the site of what is now Gaslight Pointe Marina. The ship landed during Sunday services, and worship was suspended abruptly. According to an eyewitness, a cannon announced the Chesapeake’s arrival, “and ten minutes later no one was left in the church except the preacher.” The celebration was unusually spirited. The steamship’s steward filled a tub “full of something that made a fellow’s head crack,” and it was dispensed liberally. “Some of the boys,” wrote the eyewitness, “did not get over the celebration for several days.”
When the community recovered from its hangover, Racine was forced to conclude that its new harbor was not a permanent solution. Every nor’easter clogged the channel with tons of sand, and the offending bar reappeared like and unwanted pet. Two businessmen provided and alternative for lake ships in the 1840s. They built “bridge piers,” long wharves that extended 300 to 400 feet into the lake. In calm weather, visiting ships could dock in deep water and land goods and passengers on the piers – for a fee. One bridge pier was built at 3rd Street, and the second reached into the lake from 4th Street. Continuing harbor improvements eventually put the bridge piers out of business. The constant activity was part of a general rearrangement of central Racine’s landscape. When settlement began, a thirty-foot bluff defined the future business section, and a marsh covered the river bottom north of 2nd Street. As the bluff was leveled and the river was dredged, landfill transformed the river bank. The marsh disappeared the backwater inside the mouth vanished, and Gilbert Knapp left his cabin for higher ground. Much of the activity centered on Gaslight Pointe – the focal point of Racine’s harbor. The original shoreline lay a block east of Lake Avenue. As landfill operations continued, the site expanded steadily lakeward.
As the harbor improved, so did Racine’s prospects. Roughly 300 people had followed Gilbert Knapp to the Root River by 1840, all of them gambling on the settlement’s future, and one year later Racine became a village. The homemade harbor soon opened the door to thousands more. In 1848, the same year that Wisconsin became a state, Racine received its city charter, and the community was the home of nearly 4000 people. The majority were Yankees from New York and New England, a group that quickly dominated the city’s business life, but the foundations of Racine’s ethnic diversity were already apparent. Immigrants from Germany, England, and Ireland made up more than a fourth of the population.
Racine was a point of entry for farmers as well as city-dwellers. Yankees and immigrants fanned out from the lakeshore into the fertile lands of the interior, and by 1850 Racine County’s population topped 15,000. The county’s principal farm crop was wheat. Many farmers, in fact, had brought seed grain with them from the exhausted fields of the East. The county’s wheat harvest soared from 36,000 bushels in 1840 to nearly 340,000 in 1870, and Racine prospered as a grain port. Elevators lined the banks of the Root River, and Gaslight Pointe had the largest: the Racine Warehouse and Dock Company’s elevator, built in 1867. Ten stories in height, it was Racine’s tallest building, and it could accommodate more than half of the port’s million –bushel capacity. Every elevator owner worked as a middleman, buying wheat from farmers and storing it for shipment to markets in the East.
Getting the grain to port was not a simple task in the early years. Farmers bumped along the dirt roads from as far as 100 miles away, and the trip could take days in poor weather. The first plank road (now Washington Avenue) was opened to Rochester by 1850. As other toll roads followed, the journey became less an adventure. Grain-laden wagons converged on Racine every autumn, causing traffic jams on Main Street and bringing welcome customers to the community’s stores. During the height of the season, wagons were backed up from the riverfront for blocks. Some farmers had to wait as long as fifteen hours to unload their wheat at one of the elevators.
Coming of the railroads eased the congestion. The line that became the Chicago and North Western was completed between Chicago and Milwaukee in 1855, and Racine became and important stopping point on the lakeshore route. The Racine, Janesville & Mississippi, a homegrown enterprise, was finished to Burlington in the same year. After a period of financial turmoil, the railroad became the Western Union and then a division of the Milwaukee Road, linking Racine with Beloit and ultimately Rock Island, Illinois. During the harvest season, as many as 100 cars of wheat arrived at the elevators in a single night.
Wheat was not the only cargo that left the harbor in the mid-1800s. Steamers of the Goodrich Line began to sail from the Racine harbor in about 1862, offering freight and passenger service to Milwaukee, Chicago, and other ports on Lake Michigan, (First-class fare to Milwaukee, with a meal and stateroom included, was fifty cents.) “The steamers are neat, well built and commodious,” boasted an 1872 advertisement, “and each is commanded by and experienced man.” The Goodrich ships attracted thousands of tourists, including local residents who found lake cruises a refreshing change of pace.
Whether they carried wheat or pleasure-seekers, lake ships kept the city’s waterfront busy. Racine became the self-proclaimed “Belle City of the Lake,” and the harbor was seen as the key to its prosperity. Addressing his constituents in 1861, Mayor George Northrop put the matter simply: Our harbor has contributed largely to our prosperity and is the only cause of our having a city at this point. Fill up the harbor and our place would be deserted. It is the main outlet of our productions, and cannot be neglected without serious detriment to every other interest. The value of all real estate depends chiefly on the safety and convenience of our harbor, and I recommend it to your car.”
The harbor’s importance was not destined to last. Wheat’s reign as the king of commerce reached a high point in the 1860s and came to an end by 1880. Yields declined as the soil wore out and pests appeared; wheat cultivation moved west to Minnesota and Iowa. Local farmers turned instead to diversified crops and finally to dairying. At the same time, railroads captured most of the commerce that had traveled the lakes, including what remained of the wheat trade. “Railroads have changed the busy appearance of the harbor,” lamented a local chronicler in 1879. “They have cut off much of the trade of the interior; they have caused the pulling down of six fine elevators that were all kept busy year after year.”
As if to seal the end of an era, a fire broke out in the Goodrich warehouse in 1882. Fire departments from Racine, Milwaukee, and Chicago battled the blaze, but it swept as far south as 3rd Street, destroying at least fifty buildings (including one of the last elevators) and causing $1 million in damage. The city’s lake-borne commerce, was reduced to a charred wasteland.
Racine did not become a ghost town after 1880, and did not remain a wasteland. The city, in fact, entered a period of dramatic growth, and the area was quickly rebuilt. What fueled the new prosperity was industry. Overshadowed by the wheat trade in Racine’s first decades, manufacturers had been quietly turning out products for the agricultural markets since the mid-1800s. They blossomed from local suppliers into international firms after 1880, and the city grew with them.
The story of Jerome Increase Case is typical. In 1842 he moved from upstate New York to Rochester, a village in western Racine County, where he began to tinker with a threshing machine he had brought with him from the East. Working in his kitchen, Case developed a superior design, and in 1844 he moved into Racine to begin full-time production. Wheat farmers were ready for a machine that would separate grain from straw easily and efficiently. New sales records were set every year, and Case became the nation’s leading supplier of threshing machines. As horse-powered threshers gave way to steam engines after 1869, the company found new markets. By 1884 J.I. Case employed 800 workers, all based in a sprawling factory complex across the Root River from downtown. The firm was the city’s largest employer and, in the words of one local booster, “the crowning glory of Racine’s manufacturing interests.”
Case was hardly alone. Other manufacturers helped to make Racine synonymous with quality agricultural products, including fanning mills (used to separate grain from chaff), steel plows, and wagons. The Mitchell & Lewis wagon works employed 260 mechanics in 1879, and the plant could turn out one wagon every twenty minutes. By 1900 Racine was the nation’s third-largest producer of farm implements and fourth-largest manufacturer of wagons. Although the city specialized in farm equipment, smaller firms made a remarkable range of other products, including laundry soap, silverware, traveling bags, woolen shawls, blackboards, and Horlick’s Malted Milk.
Racine’s industrial growth was part of a regional trend. Improved rail transportation, advancing technologies, plentiful raw material, and abundant labor supply, and expanding markets made the Midwest the nation’s industrial heartland in the last half of the nineteenth century. The Chicago-Milwaukee corridor became especially prominent, and Racine shared in the region’s prosperity.
The clear result was growth. Racine’s population soared from less than 10,000 in 1870 to more than 29,000 in 1900. A large number of new residents were immigrants – Germans, Bohemians, Austrians, Danes, and others – drawn to the city by the promise of jobs. Natives of Denmark, many employed by the Mitchell Wagon works, were the largest immigrant group after 1870. They made Racine the most Danish city in the state, a legacy the lives on in references to “Kringleville.”
All of the city’s major industries were located on railroad corridors. The river mouth ceased to be the community’s “front door,” and Racine, in a sense, turned its back on the lakefront. But local industries needed materials that could be shipped most easily by lake: lumber, lath, bark (for tanning), wood, coal, and iron. Lumber was the port’s leading import from 1870 to 1900, and Racine became the home of the areas largest lumber company. After the fire of 1882, Kelley Lumber opened a yard that covered most of what is now the site of the Gaslight Point Condominium. The company received millions of board feet every year from the sawmills of northern Wisconsin and Upper Michigan. It is likely that Racine manufacturers turned much of the lumber into thresher frames, wagon seat, plow handles and, in the case of S.C. Johnson, parquet flooring. (Wax came later.) Kelley also supplied building materials for a city that was growing by leaps and bounds. Thousands of Racine homes began as lumber piled on the dock
Kelley Lumber was not the only business operating in the harbor. The Goodrich Line, its warehouse rebuilt, continued to dock its steamers near the harbor entrance. Commercial fishermen docked just upstream, and they cleaned their catch in “fish houses” on the riverbank. A stool factory and a sash and door plant stood on 3rd Street near the lake. The harbor became a busy workplace – Kelley Lumber alone had 400 employees in 1910 – but Racinites also came to play. The Lakeside Roller Rink stood on the corner of 3rd and Lake for more than forty years.
The harbors physical dimensions changed rapidly in the late 1800’s. As coal and lumber ships grew steadily larger, the Root River was too shallow to accommodate them. Its channel was deepened to 17 feet in 1888, but constant dredging was necessary to maintain that depth. Government dredging crews removed 442,000 cubic yards of sand and silt from the harbor between 1890 and 1910.
In 1910 the harbor mouth became the home of the Racine Gas Light Company, a firm that would transform the city’s lakefront. Although its location was new, Racine Gas Light was among the oldest enterprises in the city. Established in 1855, it served lighting customers from a plant near Grand Avenue and Water Street-not far from Racine’s present City Hall. Like its counterparts across the country, the firm produced “manufactured gas.” Soft coal was heated to a red glow in the absence of air, producing a flammable gas that, after treatment to remove impurities, was piped to homes and businesses. By-products, including tar, ammonia, and especially coke, were recovered as completely as possible and then sold, primarily to industrial customers.
Racine Gas Light grew with the city. Its first customers were some of the communities more affluent citizens, who gladly traded their kerosene lamps for the warm glow of gaslights. The network of pipes eventually reached all sections of the city. Gaslights flickered in nearly every Racine home by the 1890’s, and they illuminated public places as well. The number of gas streetlamps rose from 32 in 1872 to 480 in 1895, all serviced by a legendary American figure, the lamplighter.
Electricity began to threaten the company’s lighting business in the late 1800’s, and new owners guided the firm to new avenues of growth. In 1899 Racine Gas Light became a branch of The Milwaukee Light, Heat and Traction Company. TMLH&T, a subsidiary of today’s Wisconsin Energy, closed the aging plant on Grand Avenue in 1900 and built a thoroughly modern facility on the harbor site purchased from Kelly Lumber. Instead of competing with the local electric company (which they also owned), the new owners marketed gas as the ideal fuel for heating and cooking. Racine Gas Light left the lighting field, but did a brisk business in stoves and water heaters. The plant operated until the early 50’s when the ovens were pulled down and the mountains of coal were tucked away. The towering gas holders, the last of which was dismantled in 1970, were used to store natural gas for emergency use until 1965. Today the site is home to the popular Gaslight Pointe Condominium development.
Racine on the lake is unique in the region. Festival Park, Gaslight Pointe Marina and Harbor Park have an unmistakable resort ambience; they offer some of the flavor of Door County, without the four hour drive. Racine will build on that ambience and carry it to a new level. New development continues to attract people to live, work and play in Racine.
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